


The Human Condition

by epicycles



Category: Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angst, Bruce Banner & Tony Stark Friendship, Gen, Hurt Tony, Hurt/Comfort, Tony talks some sense in to Bruce, basically just Tony and Bruce feels, fear vs anger, sciencebros
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-27
Updated: 2013-02-27
Packaged: 2017-12-03 22:41:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/703432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epicycles/pseuds/epicycles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce is always angry, but he's very rarely afraid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Human Condition

Bruce is always angry, but he's very rarely afraid.

He doesn't have a lot to be afraid of, being who he is. He can't be hurt, he can't die, he's already broke and homeless and on the run. Pretty much everything bad has already happened to him. It's been so long since he had something to lose, something to fear, that he doesn't even notice when that changes.

It's Tony that starts it, of course. Tony's the one who literally poked him with a stick when they first met, the one who believed he'd come back to save the day, the one who offered him a place to stay and the one who has never, ever, been afraid of him. It's been so long since Bruce had a friend that he doesn't even notice it happening -- he's so consumed with the novelty of having a lab and doing science again after so many years on the run, he doesn't notice that it's just as new for him to have the same person to talk to for days and weeks in a row. And he likes Tony, he does, even though he's not completely sure why sometimes. He likes the rest of the team as well, as their complicated lives gradually bring them into a steady orbit around Stark Tower. He's so surprised to be happy that he forgets that it can never, ever last.

It's Tony that starts it, and it's Tony that ends it as well.

~~~~~~

"For God's sake," Pepper says to Bruce. "Take him outside."

"I'm not a dog, Pep," Tony objects. "I don't need to be taken for walks."

"Obviously you do, because otherwise you wouldn't be holed up in your lab for six days with nothing to eat but Hot Pockets and coffee, you are going to get scurvy or rickets or something--"

"-- you can't get scurvy in a week --"

"-- and you have that crazy-eye look, that one right there, that is the look that says Pepper please lock me out of my lab before I build a doomsday machine --"

"-- this is how I always look and that was _one time_ \--"

"-- so no more playdates with Bruce until you have gone outside this building for at least two full hours of fresh air and exercise."

Tony looks martyred. "Exercise? Excuse me, I fly around in a giant metal suit fighting monsters, I don't think I need any more exercise --"

Bruce ignores him and asks Pepper if she has a Frisbee they can use.

In the elevator, Tony jabs irritably at the Lobby button and slumps petulantly against the wall. "You don't have to come, you know. She's just punishing me for forgetting date night."

"You have a date night?" Bruce asks, twirling a frisbee emblazoned with the Stark logo around his fingers. He can picture it written in Pepper's PDA, 'Date Night w/ Tony, raincheck Thursday if supervillains attack.'

"Apparently." Tony jabs the button again. "Are you actually hungry?"

Always. Bruce's metabolism is almost as haywire as Steve's. "Yes. Hotdogs in the park?"

That should fulfill the requirement for fresh air, plus walking there would count as exercise; Bruce knows better than to cross Pepper. Plus he likes hotdogs and Tony likes the attention he always gets from grateful New York crowds.

The ride down to the lobby is long but Tony had touchscreens installed on the walls, so Bruce spends the time showing Tony his latest algorithm for tracking gamma ray emissions. 

"Someone out there has to be experimenting," he says. "This will help us find them."

"Now that you're front-page news, there's bound to be imitators right?" Tony snorts. "Because that's worked so well in the past."

"Not everyone can be totally original like you," Bruce says. Bruce has been on both sides of that equation -- imitating Steve, imitated by Blonsky -- but Tony has never felt the need to stand on anyone else's shoulders. 

The door opens and spills them into the gleaming white and chrome lobby of Stark Tower, soon to be renamed Avengers Tower once Pepper can force Tony to schedule a ribbon-cutting. The style is all Tony though, minimalist and futuristic in an almost retro way, like Tony is trying to live in the old Stark Expo City of Tomorrow. It's a Sunday afternoon and the Tower hasn't quite reopened for business yet, so the vast open space is empty. Tony crosses it in his long ground-eating strides, like the strut he told Bruce to try the first time they met, but Bruce is more comfortable tagging along in Tony's wake.

They spin through the massive revolving door without slowing down and emerge in the bright midday sun. Tony fumbles his sunglasses onto his face, grumbling, "Ugh, why does Pepper want me out in this?"

Bruce squints against the glare. Maybe he's been inside too long himself, working in his own corner of Candyland, because he has to blink furiously to get the sidewalk to stop blinding him.

Next to him, Tony stops moving. "Hey, wait, do you see that? Something's--"

Bruce doesn't see it but he hears it. A faint whine in the air, brief, then Tony is shoving him to the ground behind a parked car, landing hard on top of him.

"Dr. Banner," comes a voice on a megaphone, a disgustingly familiar voice, and Bruce keeps his control only because of what he's learned these last few months, and because of Tony's hand on his shoulder.

"General Ross," Tony says. "That fuckhead."

Bruce is in complete agreement. He can feel the Hulk waking up inside him and he's really not sure whether it's a good idea to let him loose. On the one hand, General Ross. On the other...on the other, Tony. Tony, who is trying to shift off Bruce to let him sit up, but his moves are clumsy, uncoordinated. 

"Tony?" Bruce pushes at him with hands that feel the wrong size, and freezes.

There is a yellow tufted dart sticking out of Tony's neck, just above the collar of his shirt. 

"I don't feel so good," Tony mumbles.

The rush of white-hot anger is bright, sharp, comforting, but Bruce doesn't have time for it. He forces the Hulk down and grabs Tony, hauling him up into a stumbling run and dashing for the door to Stark Tower that feels a thousand miles away.

He can hear General Ross on the megaphone, the whistle of more darts. Three smack into his left shoulder blade but that's fine, that is _great_ , because if there's one thing Bruce can't do right now it's let the Hulk take over. 

Tony is tripping over his own feet and Bruce hates how weak he is like this, that he can't just pick Tony up and run. They hit the revolving door, push through it, and Bruce is tumbling to the floor of Stark Tower.

"Jarvis! Lockdown!" Bruce yells, and the windows go opaque. The doors lock and an alarm starts ringing in the distance. Bruce doesn't hear it because he's still yelling, "Call the Avengers! And Pepper! And SHIELD, and an ambulance--"

And everyone, call everyone, because Bruce needs help. Tony's lying limp on the floor beside him, shot up with a tranquilizer meant for Bruce, meant for the _Hulk_. Bruce yanks the dart out of Tony's neck but he can feel the same sedative in his own bloodstream -- M99, etorphine, and how sad is it that Bruce can identify it by the slow sluggish feeling it's dragging through his own veins?

But M99 is for _elephants_ and while Bruce can take it and still be awake and moving and angry, Tony is just a man. A man without his suit of armor and Bruce is suddenly, brutally aware of how vulnerable that makes him.

"Tony?" Bruce says, fighting the growl from his voice. "Tony, are you okay?"

He knows Tony isn't, it's obvious from the boneless flop of his arms as Bruce rolls him over. Deeply unconscious, at least, his face pale and slack. Bruce presses two fingers to the hinge of Tony's jaw and feels a too-slow thumping pulse, thank God, thank _God_ , but there's no relief at all because Tony isn't breathing.

Bruce knows how to deal with anger, but the cold slice of fear cuts too sharp and too deep. His hands are already green on Tony's face as he tilts his chin up. The sedative is holding the Hulk back but Bruce can feel that it won't be enough.

Five minutes, he just needs five minutes until help can arrive and his team can take over, five minutes or Tony dies because Bruce couldn't keep it together.

"Just five minutes, then you can come out," Bruce promises the Hulk, as the Other Guy pulls at him. "Five minutes, please."

He closes his mouth over Tony's, breathes. Tony's lips are cold. "Please."

He keeps breathing for Tony as the rest of the world fades into a dull roar in the back of his mind, a roar that sounds like the Other Guy's voice. The longer he breathes the harder it gets, because he can feel Tony slipping away and it's tearing at him, and with each rip the Other Guy gets closer to breaking free.

Glass shatters behind him and he pauses, looking at Tony's white face and blue lips. He reaches to check Tony's pulse again but his fingers are thick and green and he can't feel anything, nothing at all. 

"No no no no, I'm not done, please--" Bruce says, his voice rolling deeper and rougher even as he says it. He clasps his too-large mouth to Tony's again, one more desperate breath, before he's being pulled down and away. 

He grabs once more for Tony, for control, but the Other Guy forces him down even while he screams.

Then he's gone.

~~~~

He wakes up alone.

Bruce never wakes up alone. Ever since Natasha tricked him into that shack in Kolkata, there's always been someone with him after an "incident." Usually Tony, often Natasha, sometimes Steve or Clint. It's a bad sign if he wakes up with Mjolnir sitting on his chest, but Thor is always nearby to lift it away.

Now he's alone, he's naked, and he doesn't know where he is. It's like the last five months never happened.

There's a moment where he thinks it was all a dream. Then he remembers. Tony.

But he can't remember what came next. Sometimes after an incident he knows what the Other Guy has been up to, even if it's just brief flashes, but this time there's just nothing. The gut-wrenching fear, the slow fade-out, then he's here. Wherever here is -- it looks like the port outside the city, industrial and unwelcoming. The concrete is cold beneath his bare skin.

Bruce gets up, body aching. He goes to look for two things: clothes, and a television.

Over the years he's gotten good at scrounging clothes. It's a gradual process -- get anything you can to cover your junk, then pants, then a shirt, then keep trading up until you look decent enough not to get hassled by cops.

Once he's put together enough to avoid getting arrested, he panhandles enough cash to get the bus to one of his stashes. He has hidden nooks all over the city, each with enough clothing and cash to get him out of town and over a border. He's got one near the Tower, of course, and one near SHIELD's on-the-ground HQ, but he's got a dozen others all over the five boroughs. Bruce has been doing this for a long time.

When he gets back into the city he switches to the subway. There's a television playing at one of the newsstands in the station. It's playing a loop of the Other Guy going to town on General Ross's goons outside the Tower. Bruce stops to watch. He can see Thor and the red blur of Natasha, and a brief zip of an arrow through the frame that means Clint's leaning out of an upper-story window. No sign of Steve, or of Tony.

He watches the Other Guy scream wordless rage into the sky, and turns away.

Half an hour later he's retrieved his stash, changed into nondescript but sturdy clothes that none of the Avengers have ever seen before, tucked away his money and fake passport. He's got time for once, so he goes for some of his other stashes to build up his cash reserve. He's starving -- he never did get that hotdog -- so he stops at a burger joint. There's a TV in the corner.

The best thing about Tony being a world-famous globe-trotting playboy is that his near-death experiences make the national news.

"Billionaire superhero Tony Stark was rushed to hospital today after an attack on Stark Tower left an entire city block in ruins," the closed captions roll slowly across the silent image of a dour news anchor. "Government spokespeople are refusing to give any details as to the cause of the attack or the reports of a US military operation in the area, but SHIELD sources say it was a direct attempt on the life of one of the Avengers. Our sources would not confirm that Mr. Stark was the target but did say that he was injured in the attack and is expected to survive."

Tony's alive.

Bruce puts a hand over his face, lets himself feel the knee-watering relief for a minute or two. Tony is alive, he didn't die because of Bruce's enemies or Bruce's incompetence. The knot of fear that's been choking him finally starts to ease, but in the end it doesn't change anything.

He still has to leave.

~~~~~~

A month later, Bruce is in Argentina.

Getting out of New York had been easy. Knowing where to go had been hard. In the end he'd gone south and just kept going, getting by on his tiny stock of cash, Spanish and medical knowledge until he got here: Ushuaia, Fin del Mundo. A small city perched under the sharp black mountains at the absolute bottom of the world.

It's a beautiful place, really. There's a harshness to the land here in Tierra del Fuego that Bruce can appreciate. It's fall in the Southern Hemisphere and Bruce is enjoying the crisp bite of cold coming in from the south. 

Bruce is sitting on a bare wooden bench by the harbor with one of the city's everpresent stray dogs at his feet, thinking about whether he wants to turn back North or whether he wants to just keep going South, across the water to Antarctica. He's pretty sure even the Other Guy couldn't get into too much trouble there.

A weight settles next to him on the bench.

"You don't make yourself easy to find, do you?" Tony says.

"That's the general idea," Bruce says mildly. "How did you manage it?"

"Genius, remember? Plus you gave me a present, a very accurate gamma-ray tracking algorithm, right before you left. Did you know you give off a constant low-level gamma signature?"

Bruce did, in fact, know that. He'd hoped that Tony didn't, or that Tony wouldn't be able to reconstruct it to track him. Of course he was wrong.

"Why are you here, Tony?"

"What, that's all I get? No reunion hug? No cries of surprised relief over my escape from the jaws of death?"

"I knew you were alive, Tony. You're kind of famous," Bruce says, unable to stop the smile. He does turn his head, finally, to get a look at Tony. He looks...good. Alive. Not gray or blue but tan and cocky as ever. Bruce has the sudden desire to put a hand on Tony's neck, to feel his pulse for himself after days of nightmares where there was nothing under his fingers.

Tony elbows Bruce companionably, like he knows it's exactly what Bruce needs. "I am _very_ famous, thank you very much. Except here at the ends of the Earth, apparently -- the hotel wanted to see my ID. My _ID_."

He sounds so disgusted, Bruce has to laugh at him. "Did you have any?"

"Luckily Pepper packed my carry-on. She says hi, by the way. So does Steve. Thor says "HAIL FRIEND" and Clint says you owe him twenty bucks. Oh, and Natasha says she's going to --"

"I get it, Tony."

"Do you? Then why did I have to chase you down to fucking Antarctica?"

"You know why."

Tony's got a hard, determined set to his mouth now. "Maybe I want to hear you say it."

Bruce sighs. "You nearly died. Because of me. Happy?"

"You know, I may have been wacked out on an opiate derivative but the way I heard it, you saved my life."

"I tried to. Tony, I tried as hard as I could. But it wasn't enough. You needed real help but all you got was the Other Guy." 

"So what, you think that you need to run because sometimes you might change from being a dazzlingly brilliant scientist into an unbeatable fighting machine at the wrong moment? Take it from an expert, that is like, bush-league self-doubt." 

"Tony..."

"No, that is your 'be serious' voice, and I'm being serious. You saved my life. If I was ever in any trouble, it's not because the Hulk was there but because _you weren't_. And running off to Argentina is not really a solution to the problem of you not being there."

"You can't count on a teammate who might disappear any moment."

"And get replaced by another, equally valuable teammate. Still waiting for the downside, Big Guy."

"I couldn't control it," Bruce blurted, almost shouting. "Okay? I thought I was getting better, I thought I had the anger under control. And I do, but only the anger. I wasn't angry this time."

"You weren't angry that General Ross pumped me full of elephant tranquilizers? I think I'm hurt."

"I wasn't angry, Tony, I was _scared_. Absolutely terrified. And that's what let the Other Guy loose." Bruce looks down at his shoes, clenches his fingers tight against the fabric of his pants. Even the memory of the fear is almost enough to change him. "I was so scared that you were going to die that I almost let it happen."

Tony's silent for a long moment. Bruce watches the veins pulse on the backs of his hands. 

Then Tony is rummaging in the plastic bag beside him on the bench, coming up with a little sack of caramelized almonds and offering it to Bruce. It's an echo of their first meeting and it makes Bruce crack a smile. He unclenches one hand and digs out a palmful of nuts.

Tony's plan is obvious. Once Bruce's mouth is full and no longer saying stupid things, Tony can talk as much as he likes without interruption. 

"You told Cap that your secret is you're always angry. Well, this is the secret of the rest of humanity: we're always scared.

"Every time I put on the armor, I'm terrified. What if I don't come back? What if I do but someone else doesn't? What if someone dies because I'm not fast enough? What if I miss the alien invader and hit some random pedestrian instead? Another day, another million new ways to fuck up and kill someone.

"And then came the team, and suddenly I'm responsible for all you assholes too. Now I have to worry about my own ass and the entire world _and_ an overly-heroic supersoldier and an archer who can't stop falling off buildings. Now I have to be afraid that I'm going to fuck up and kill _one of you_. I have to be afraid that my team's going to do something stupid of their own and I won't be there to save them.

"I know why you ran away. I get it. Now you have something to fear, and you think it's a weakness. And it is. But you have to wrap yourself up in it and make it into strength. You're afraid you'll make a mistake? That makes you careful. You're afraid you'll let one of us get hurt? That makes you work harder to protect us. You're afraid you won't be good enough? That makes you better. 

"And I am the last person on Earth to give you a rah-rah team-spirit pep talk, but having people to worry about means you have people worrying about you too. People to watch your back. People who can pick up the slack when you fail. People who will stop you if you go too far. 

"So yeah, you couldn't save me. The thing is, you didn't have to. I got the Kiss of Life from Captain America and I'm still here, with one less item on my bucket list. I'm still here because Cap's scared too, so when the alarm went off he ran as fast as he could to help us. 

"I don't blame you if you don't want to come back, if you just want to hang around with penguins for the next fifty years. You think you can't control the Other Guy any more. But did running work before? Did it work to hide from anything and everything that might make you angry? Or did that just make it worse? Did you stop worrying about us when you came down here, or did you keep checking the news to see how we were doing? You couldn't run from your anger and you can't run from your fear.

"So be angry. Be afraid. Just do it with us, okay?"

Tony is watching Bruce when he finishes, with that same knowing, understanding look he'd annoyed Bruce with back on the Helicarrier that first day. His knee is jiggling a little, either with nerves or just from the stress of sitting still.

Bruce swallows his mouthful of almonds. "Can I talk now?"

Tony quirks a smile. "Maybe. Depends on what you're going to say."

"I was going to say, thank you."

"Does that mean you're coming back?"

Bruce stares out across the water for a minute. "I didn't get to see any penguins."

Tony claps him on the back. "We've got the Quinjet, we can make a pit stop."

~~~

Bruce is always angry and he's often scared, but he's very rarely alone.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Futurama. "We're all scared, it's the human condition."


End file.
